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Comment by ffriend | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what's the boundary between ethical and unethical. People constantly analyze each other's mood and it's perceived positively. But doing the same thing massively using automated tools is often considered inappropriate. So is it because of using technology, massiveness, purposes? I hope there's a way to make such things both efficient and not unethical.

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It is unethical because there's no "opt-out" option. You have taken a photo of me without my consent, used it for intents to increase profit despite not having my consent; and furthermore, attaching personal data to it is Orwellian and a complete invasion of my privacy. I can go out in public and have nobody know who I am. A retailer should not have access to my identity (since they can cross-reference other data sets to deanonymize me)unless I interact with them and hand over information of my own volition.

As far as I know, storing personal data - including photo, name, email and sometimes even IP address - without explicit and clear consent is strictly forbidden in most countries, at least in EU.

The only way this could possibly be considered ethical is if you get informed consent from every single person the system is analysing. If you provided each person with a detailed explanation of what the data would be used for, and required them to opt-in before collecting it, that would be fine.

Otherwise, what you're doing is deeply unethical.

That's at the heart of it - is examining a person in public with automated tools, unethical? Just saying it is, isn't a compelling argument.

The FBI can use automated tools for surveillance - which doesn't speak to ethics directly but indirectly, as we hope ethics drove those rules.

I can sit in my private store and observer people out the window all day, even take notes. That's not unethical; that's a sociological experiment or some such, and done millions of times a day.

It may be jarring or creepy to imagine an advertisement is sizing me up. Again, ethics is more than 'does it make people uncomfortable'.

Manipulating people on a mass scale without their informed consent has always been considered unethical; its on you if you're trying to argue that its not.

And you're 'but what if a person does it' arguments are irrelevant - there's a clear difference of scale between the massively automated systems we're discussing and a single person with a pencil and paper.

It was one billboard ad - not really 'massively automated'. Would have been cheap to hire an intern to stand behind the billboard and make notes. Probably cheaper.

I think terms of service have something to do with it. In most profiling scenarios, the average consumer has no idea what's going to happen to the data collected on them. I'd be much more comfortable participating in a value-exchange involving your product if I knew precisely what information would be collected, how long it would be stored, who would have access to it during that time frame, what would happen to it at the end of that term, and precisely how that information would be capitalized upon. That probably seems ridiculous to you, but from my perspective, it represents a precise definition of the value I'm yielding to you, and a reasonably precise definition of the risk I'm incurring by doing so.

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